"I'm Their Boy"

Old William Hill was Niagara's best-known riverman, a veteran of three rides through the rapids below the falls in a barrel. He was credited with recovering 177 bodies cast up by the river. Before he died in 1942, he told his son William Jr.: "Look after the river, Red." Red Hill worked at odd jobs, did some tourist guiding, shot the rapids himself in 1945 and 1948, gradually developed an irresistible hankering to go over the falls from the top. If he did it and lived, he would be the fourth person in history to accomplish the feat.* Said he: "People want to see somebody go over those falls. I'm their boy."

Hill decided to make his craft as light as possible, to clear the rocks and bob quickly to the surface after the 162-ft. drop. He fashioned a cylinder of 13 truck-tire inner tubes held together with netting, fitted it with an air mattress, christened it The Thing. This week a crowd of more than 100,000 Sunday sightseers gathered for two miles along the banks of the Canadian Horseshoe Falls to watch the show; Hill's mother was among them.

The Thing rocketed straight out from the brink of the falls, dropped into foam, bounced into view once or twice, then vanished in the mist. A few minutes later it bobbed free of the boiling water, just as Hill had predicted, but it had been broken to a tangled, shapeless mass. Hill was gone. His mangled body was recovered 16 hours later near the pier of the famed Maid of the Mist sightseeing boat.

* The others: Mrs. Anna Edson Taylor in 1901; Bobby Leach in 1911 (he died a few years later, after slipping on a banana peel); Jean Lussier, in a rubber ball, in 1928. Two others tried and perished, in 1920 and 1930. Red Hill saw the second die.

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